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The Everyday Lives of American Slaves

WASHINGTON — American slaves managed ingeniously to acquire a few material comforts. They wove their own twine fishing nets and grass baskets, and molded and kilned ceramic bowls with African motifs. On patches of land near their cabins they grew gourds to adapt into banjos, rattles and drums.

Masters sometimes supplied slaves with luxuries, like French horns and porcelain teacups. The indulgences, of course, did not compensate for the cruelties of captivity.

“The number of advertisements found in English and American newspapers listing runaway slaves who could play the French horn suggests that they were by no means happy with their lot,” the historian Hillary Murtha writes in a new two-volume book “World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States” (ABC-CLIO/Greenwood).

The book’s editors, Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, collected 178 essays from about 80 fellow historians. The preface explains that the team aimed to cover “the everyday lives of the enslaved: what they wore, saw and looked at; played and played with; ate and drank and smoked; worked on and in; heard, read, used, made, touched, hid away, lived in, built, were given, slept on, carried, raised and cultivated; were sold on; and much more.”

Ms. Rice and Ms. Katz-Hyman also quoted from about 100 transcripts of 1930s interviews with elderly former slaves, who told of watching friends and relatives die from infections they got from shackled limbs, among other horrors. There are also anecdotes about some blissful moments of leisure. Foster Weathersby, who picked cotton as a child in Mississippi, recalled adults gathering in the evenings around a guitar player outside the slave cabins, “talkin’ of de hopes and fears of de comin’ war to free us.”

During a recent interview at Ms. Rice’s office in the museum studies department at George Washington University, the editors said they tried to balance appalling descriptions of neck bells and whips with objects that gave slaves some control over their fate.

Slaves could learn skills on plantations that helped them win freedom and support themselves. For instance Harriet Jacobs, a seamstress from North Carolina, sold her wares while on the run for years “from an oppressive master,” Katie Knowles writes in the encyclopedia’s entry on clothing and footwear. Jack Frowers, a South Carolina farmhand, paddled across creek waters to join Union troops “in a vessel he had made from coarse grass twisted into a rope,” Dale Rosengarten notes in the basket making essay.

Slaves found ways to flout Southern laws “time and time again,” Ms. Katz-Hyman said. “The picture that comes out — it’s much more complex than most lay people would imagine. This is not, excuse me, black and white.” She added, “You can make generalizations, but there are so many caveats.”

Photo

“Execution of Frank McIlhenney: Deserted to the Enemy,” part of “Civil War Drawings From the Becker Collection,” opening Jan. 15 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the University of Richmond's Joel and Lila Harnett Print Study Center.Credit
Becker Collection

She and Ms. Rice kept fact checking and revising the text until the last minute, partly because the field’s scholarship keeps evolving.

Some artifacts on the antiques market, like copper identification badges for Charleston slaves, have often turned out to be 20th-century fakes. And legends have been debunked recently, like the one about interlocking quilt patterns said to be coded maps for Underground Railroad refugees.

“No authentic ‘code’ quilt or artifact supporting these stories has ever been produced,” Leigh Fellner writes in the quilts entry, noting that the fabric maps are not mentioned “in the accounts left by hundreds of successful escaped slaves.”

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As a child Sheila Gallagher played hide-and-seek in a bedroom closet at her great-aunt’s rambling waterfront home in East Hampton, N.Y. While waiting for the seekers to find her, Ms. Gallagher, now an associate professor of fine arts at Boston College, would leaf through the closet’s stacks of Victorian sketches of the Civil War.

“I remember being hugely curious about them,” Ms. Gallagher said in a recent telephone interview. In the pencil drawings dead horses are scattered along battlefield trenches. Freed slaves gather for prayers and haul around wheelbarrows to build levees. Drummers surround a disgraced officer wearing a sign around his neck that declared, “Coward.”

Ms. Gallagher’s family inherited the collection from her great-great-grandfather, Joseph Becker, a staff artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The editors embedded artists to document the war’s fast, bloody battles and nighttime attacks, which that era’s unwieldy cameras could not capture. The hasty pencil outlines were shipped back to the newspaper’s New York offices and formalized into engravings that Leslie called “authentic illustrations of the Secession Movement and the important and thrilling events which arise out of it.”

The collection reveals how Leslie’s engravers heavily sanitized the sketches to appeal to patriotic Northern readers. In the published versions flags were added to bedraggled regiments, and deserters were erased from the hills. In a drawing of one gory scene from the Battle of Shiloh, Ms. Gallagher said, a wounded soldier in the foreground “is clearly screaming in agony as a doctor is probably amputating his arm.” After Leslie’s engravers turned the scene into a printing plate, she added, “he has this beatific look heavenward.”

The exhibition, organized with Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, will be on the road for the next few years. When it returns to Boston, the Gallaghers will probably donate it to a museum willing to analyze and show it. Little is known about some of the artists, and countless buildings and faces in the tableaus have not been identified. “It’s a huge project, and there’s still a lot to be done,” Ms. Gallagher said.

Boston College has posted the collection online in a searchable database, which has already fostered new research. One image shows a Confederate spy being executed; one of his descendants recently recognized him and e-mailed Ms. Gallagher. The message briefly stymied her, she said. “What do you say in response to that, ‘Congratulations on your discovery’?”

A version of this article appears in print on January 7, 2011, on Page C29 of the New York edition with the headline: The Everyday Lives
Of American Slaves. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe